Douglas Jehl, "Saudis' Heartland is Seething With Rage at Rulers
and U.S."

New York Times, November 5, 1996

BURAIDA, Saudi Arabia: Far from the palaces of the capital and the Red
Sea coast, this is Saudi Arabia's religious heartland, where beards are
worn untrimmed and resentment toward those in power is not easily disguised.

It was in Buraida two years ago that Saudi dissent last spilled into
the streets, when several thousand people joined a radical cleric in a
36-hour protest. In the clampdown that followed, the authorities arrested
the cleric and hundreds of dissidents and have banned political discussion
from the country's mosques.

But along a main street of shabby shops and Toyota pickup trucks, there
were some still willing to divulge to a Western visitor their unhappiness
with the monarchy that has ruled Saudi Arabia since it was forged 64 years
ago.

"The people are angry, but for now, there's not much we can do,"
a shopkeeper in his 30's said. "We talk to each other, and we talk
to God."

Rocked by two terrorist bombings in a year, and facing a potent blend
of flat oil revenues, a population boom and a religious militancy that
increasingly questions the legitimacy of its rulers, Saudi Arabia is facing
evident challenges at home.

They may be most clearly on display here, in this city at the historic
heart of the Nejd region where Abdel Ariz al-Saud led a religious brotherhood
drawn from local tribes in the conquests that gave him thrall over all
of Arabia.

"These guys are under pressure in ways they've never been under
pressure before," an American Government official said of the Saudi
royal family.

In recent conversations around the country, the vast majority of Saudis
assured a visitor of their strong support for the monarchy, while senior
Saudi officials insisted that there was no reason for alarm.

"One thing to keep in mind in thinking about dissent in the kingdom
is how minor it is, and how abhorrent it is to the majority of Saudis,
particularly when violent methods are used," said Prince Turki bin
Faisal, who heads the country's Department of General Intelligence.

But within the Clinton Administration, American officials say, a gloomier
view has been expressed in recent months by the Central Intelligence Agency,
with analysts beginning to question how long the monarchy can survive.

An Administration official said several high-level meetings had been
held recently in Washington to assess how the United States would be affected
if a less friendly regime came to power in Saudi Arabia.

It is virtually impossible to accurately guage the depth of discontent
in a society like Saudi Arabia's, where dissent cannot openly be voiced
and people guard their privacy fiercely.

But in Buraida, a hotbed of religious militancy, and even in the poorer
neighborhoods of Riyadh, 200 miles to the southeast, what proved notable
was the extent to which a number of residents echoed strains of the case
against the monarchy advanced by dissidents abroad and militants in this
country, many of whom are now in jail.

A significant number spoke also of Saudi Arabia's economic situation
and the narrower horizons they now see for themselves and for a country
that once seemed blessed with almost limitless wealth.

Saudi Arabia still sits on one-fourth of the world's known oil reserves,
and it currently produces eight million barrels of oil a day, more than
twice the daily yield of any other country.

But it has had to make amends for years of unrestrained spending, cutting
back on the generous subsidies that helped to buy the good will of its
citizens and making clear that many of those now entering the job market
will have to accept sub-par positions once delegated to foreigners.

Opponents of the Saudi Government, who say the royal family has betrayed
its role as custodian of Islam's holiest sites, have also accused its members
of having squandered the country's wealth through wastefulness and greed.

And in Buraida, a city of 200,000 where women are seen in public only
when shrouded all in black and where the religious police enforce the five-times-daily
call to prayer, it was apparent that the attack had found resonance.

"You remember that bomb in Al Khobar?" one young merchant
said over tea in the back room of his shop, referring to the car-bomb blast
in June that killed 19 American airmen at a base in Dhahran. "I did
not like, but only for one reason: it hit only the Americans, when the
target should have been the Government itself."

The Religion

Dynasty's Founder Took Title of Imam

Like the father and three brothers who preceded him to the throne, King
Fahd of Saudi Arabia relies on the approval of his country's religious
leadership, which in turn acts as protector of the Wahabi Muslim principles
on which the kingdom was founded.

From the beginning of his rule, King Abdel Aziz -- the founder of the
royal family -- assumed the title of imam, or law giver, and his sons have
been bestowed that role by the religious leadership, known as the ulema.

But a minority among the followers of King Abdel Aziz never accepted
him as their imam, and they rose against their leader in the Ikhwan rebellion
of the late 1920's, which ended only when the King put them down by force.

In weathering conservative challenges since then, the Saudi Government
has similarly had to face down religious extremists who do not regard its
rule as legitimate.

Many people in Saudi Arabia describe the latest challenge, which began
to surface in 1992, after the Persian Gulf war, as amounting to another
rebellion, but one reinforced by signs that the Government has lost support
from elements of the religious establishment, including militant preachers
like Sheik Salman al-Awdah, who preaced regularly at the Buraida mosque.

Along with Sheik Safar al-Hawali and others, Sheik Awdah applied the
unyielding Wahabi tenets, based on a literal reading of the Koran, to describe
the condut of royal family as secular and corrupt. These clerics accused
the Sauds of betraying the laws of Islam, in part by permitting infidel
Western troops a presence on the Arabian Peninsula, the site of Islam's
two holiest sites.

While the clerics never advocated violence, the Wahabi outlook allows
little room for rival ways of thought, even among fellow Sunni Muslims.
Saudi experts on radical Islamic movements say these attacks -- recorded
on cassette tapes that circulated throughout the kingdom -- have helped
to fuel deep antipathy to the Saudi Government.

"To the extremists, to declare the Government as illegitimate makes
it an infidel government," said Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist.
"And the moment they declare a government an infidel government, they
believe they have the right to fight against it."

Warned to quiet his attacks, Sheik Awdah, instead gathered thousands
of followers in the rally here that ended with his arrest and those of
Sheik Hawali and at least 400 others around the country. But while both
clerics remain in prison, interviews found that support for them remains
powerful in Buraida, whose residents proudly describe it as the most conservative
place in Saudi Arabia.

Apart from the march two years ago, residents say, the town has demonstrated
no outright signs of dissent. But cassettes of Sheik Awdah's sermons still
circulate clandestinely, and videotape shot during the demonstration has
formed lasting impressions on the minds of American officials whose responsibilities
include this country.

Describing scenes that included "at least hundreds of young men
running about," one Western diplomat said, "It was all very dramatic,
because this is Saudi Arabia, and this never happens."

The Economy

Decline in Income Magnifies Discontent

In the last 15 years, per capita annual income in Saudi Arabia has plunged
by about two- thirds, to about $6,700, mostly because of a population boom.
That has magnified discontent and given new ammunition to those who accuse
the royal family of failing to manage the country's resources wisely.

"The people need to eat," a Saudi in his 20's said in an interview
in a poorer quarter of Riyadh, whose residents include Saudis and low-paid
foreign workers from Pakistan and India. "And as life has become more
difficult, we have begun to believe that someone must bear the blame."

For many in Saudi Arabia, the United States is an easy target. Despite
evidence to the contrary, most Saudis remain convinced that the American
Government profited from the gulf war at the expense of the Saudi treasury.

And religious conservatives, who contend that the presence of some 5,000
United States servicemen here contravenes the Wahabi interpretation of
Islamic law, have condemned what they describe as an unwholesome American
influence on the country and its rulers.

Both criticisms have attracted new adherents in the last year, a time
when Washington's perceived pro-Israeli bias in Middle East peace talks
has angered public opinion across the Arab world.

And in the aftermath of the bombings, both ahve been fanned by Saudi
dissidents abroad, including Osama bin Laden, the billionaire exile who
in September called on his followers to begin a "holy war" against
the United States and its military presence.

"The Americans don't understand that they are not wanted,"
Khalid bin Abdelrahman el- Fawaz, a close associate of Mr. bin Laden, said
in an interview in London. "They only understand the language of violence.
It happened in Lebanon: they ran away only after there was major bloodshed.
The same thing happened in Somalia. So the Saudi people thought: why don't
we give them bloodshed?"

Except in extraordinary circumstances, Muslims are forbidden under Islamic
law to kill fellow Muslims, so even Islamic extremists find it far easier
to countenance attacks against so-called infidels.

Most American and Saudi experts nevertheless see the bomb attacks of
the last year as evidence of opposition to the Saudi Government, whose
decision to allow American forces to base themselves in the kingdom to
repel Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 found little support within the
Saudi population.

But even the most outspoken among the Saudi dissidents in London acknowledge
that they have neither the ability nor the intention to challenge the Government
with force. And in interviews in Washington and Riyadh, American experts
and Western diplomats said they did not believe that the Government faced
a near-term threat.

"I don't see any signs that the Al Saud are in any imminent danger
whatsoever," a Western diplomat in Riyadh said. "The queston
is: over the next 5 to 10 years, will they make the changes they need to
keep themselves in power, or will they make fatal choices that will undermine
their rule?"

The Outlook

Rulers More Wary Over Ties With U.S.

If the nightmare scenario for the West is the collapse of the Saudi
Government in an Iranian-style revolution, the consensus among Western
analysts is that such an outcome remains extraordinarily unlikely. There
is no evidence, the analysts say, of any mass inclination to confront the
Government by taking to the streets.

But under King Fahd, who suffered a stroke last year, the Saudi monarchy
appears to be treading carefully around public sentiment, perhaps most
notably by its refusal this fall to allow the United States to mount its
latest round of attacks against Iraq from Saudi bases.

The Saudis have also seemed determined to keep American investigators
at arm's length from their investigation of the Dhahran bombing, a stand
based either on sovereignty concerns or wariness about allowing outsiders
to take stock of their internal difficulties.

A sense of unease also has been apparent in the attention given by Saudi
newspapers recently to religious seminars whose consistent theme has been
that loyalty to the imam, to the King, is a Muslim virtue. The country's
second-ranking religious figure, Sheik Mohammed bin Otheimin, ruled that
to criticize the King from within the chamber of the mosque would be to
commit an act of heresy.

After bombings that Clinton Administration officials said underscored
how much about Saudi Arabia the West still did not know, a puzzle that
remains in a society that does not allow dissent is how to weigh the complaints
that do surface.

On that subject, a Saudi man who politely turned a visitor away from
his office in Buraida stopped first to offer a piece of advice.

"The official point of view," he said, "is that the Americans
are our friends -- friends to the gulf in general, and friends to the kingdom.
That is the policy of the Government, and if people are asked a question
here, that is the way they are expected to answer."